Hopsee

Inspiration

Often I would stand in a taxi queue waiting for the taxi, I will be there with twenty other passengers yet no one is sharing the taxi, most of the taxis leave with one passenger. So the idea of the Hopsee was born to connect people to find each other and share a taxi.

Hopsee helps to improve Morocco taxi sharing experience by:

Enabling people riding or intending to ride a taxi find each other easily based on their to and from location

Sharing the taxis with Hopsee will enable people to split their fare, we allow multiple parties to share one taxi which can result in significant reduction of cost for the passengers.

Once passengers going from/to similar direction they can chat as a group to arrange their ride details.

The app allows Taxi drivers to discover individuals or already connected groups of people, the taxi driver can join the group to offer them to ride and facilitate taxi sharing process.

The user of the app can rate their co-passangers to encourage the best behaviour through social proof providing an additional level of safety.

The app has support chat functionality where users can contact our support team in case of any problems or emergencies.

We also provide an option for women to choose to share taxi only with other women, providing an additional level of security.

What it does

Hopsee allows taxi passengers to enter rides and discover other people to share a taxi.

The rides one enters can be seen by other users of the app.

The users can choose to join rides in the app.

Once the user requests to join a ride, the other person will get notification where they can review the requestors details and rating, if they want to share accept the request.

Once ride request is accepted the users are in a chat window from where they can chat with each other to arrange the details such as time and place of meeting.

From the same screen users can also check each other's location on a live map.

The taxi drivers can use the app to discover people needing the rides and offer them the ride as a group.

We also offer Hopsee Chat, which is our support and help chat line, anyone messages entered there are routed to our support desk which will offer assistance to users or can help in case of emergency.

At the end of the ride the users rate each other, this is to ensure best behaviour.

How I built it

We built the app using Apple Swift language and Google Firebase as the backend, the app makes extensive use of GPS and geolocation and Google Maps. We also have Android version which was built in Java.

Challenges I ran into

Technically our challenge was learning SWIFT and IOS ecosystem.

From user point of view the biggest challenge is that we need a lot of users entering a lot of rides to find matching routes. If there is not enough rides in the system the users will not get good experience and retention will be low. So the key challenge is building a supply of the rides in the system.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Using sophisticated Geolocation functionality, live chat functionality between passengers.

What I learned

We learned the importance of building community and supply of rides. This is a difficult challenge to overcome even in densely populated city such as Hong Kong is.

What's next for Hopsee

We are working on introducing corporate ride sharing initiatives, working with large corporates to run internal campaigns for their employees to share rides via taxis or private cars to work. The corporate ride sharing offers several benefits to the corporates: 1) Reducing CO2 footprint 2) Building community and connecting employees who otherwise might have never talked.